Sometimes, one of the best ways for both teacher and students to ingrain useful training methods _ is for the teacher to ask the group to voice what if anything of real value they will be taking with them after class.

Was it a new concept that changed their thinking as to survival tactics/movements applications in accordance with their personal goals?

Was it a new aspect of repetitive techniques that will be thought to improve their fighting abilities?

You would be surprised at the results.

If they have nothing to say, then the teacher must question his own teaching abilities.

In the following I am going to exemplify this by using Adorno’s radicaltransformation of Sigmund Freud’s speculation from “Totem and Taboo”that in the beginning of human civilization there was a psychologicallymomentous murder.

Freud traces the socio-cultural taboo of violencebetween human beings back to its initial violation by the primal murder.

According to Darwin, prehistoric mankind – the so called primal horde –lived under the rule of an omnipotent male. Based on this theorem, Freudrecognizes that the decisive step to change “this earliest state of society” wasthe alliance of young males against the father, whom they overwhelm andkill.2

The threatening fratricidal war and the ambivalent feelings for thefather, however, lead to the remorseful ritual revocation of the murder byprohibiting the killing of the father’s symbolic substitute, the totem, and bytabooing incest.

According to “Totem and Taboo,” the founding act ofcivilization is thus murder.

Freud emphasizes this theorem with the famousquotation from Goethe’s “Faust” “that ‘in the beginning was the Deed,’”3 but

I think it is more accurate to say in the beginning was the murder, i.e. thepatricide.

Would you do a kata in a fight? No. Of course not. The point is that you do the moves and learn the application of the moves to the point that when you are in combat - they can "pop out" at the appropriate moment. Therefore, the purpose of kata is to transcend kata.

The purpose of using the sights is for mind/body coordination, for muscle memory, that so-called "unconsciously competent" state which is better expressed as "Mu-shin no shin" or mind of no mind where the mind is not "stopped" in the mechanics of the tool.

If you find yourself in a long-range shooting situation, you might also use sights there. But for close-in combat, the front sight post is there to train your alignment, not for use in actual combat.

The point is mastery of the tool so that the mind remains free to operate tactically instead of having to focus on the mechanics of bringing the weapon to bear, use it and keep it running. For that, use the front sight when getting used to a new weapon.

If you then find yourself properly aligned WITHOUT using the front sight post, you can take the shot and still get the hit. It's like the zen archers who look straight ahead - and connect without even looking at the target. Because they are properly aligned, they are "one with the target" and need not look at the target to hit it.

“The point is mastery of the tool so that the mind remains free to operate tactically instead of having to focus on the mechanics of bringing the weapon to bear, use it and keep it running.”

I love this comment being here on this thread because it brings directly to mind the approach we should have when working on Kata.

Kata is a means to work our mechanics of bringing our weapons to bear when we have no partner to work with and also to remove the “threat” so that only the proper mechanics of bringing our weapons to bear can be focused on without distraction.

And the purpose is to so ingrain these that we can then turn them over to the part of the brain that looks after such things while we then focus on operating tactically.

The problem with Kata is that there are three types of folks who do them.those who know what a Kata is, those who don't and those who invent new meanings for the kata..From the folks who don't know.they hold back the " magic" kata that you are just not ready for .what bullschitt

I have met all three types.but with wing chun and my last teacher I struck lucky.he knew kata and he was a fighter ,as was his teacher ..so I got some good stuff..they didn't train kata that much ( I heard that Kanbun didn't either) what they did was small bits of Kata, which were tested against all types of folks and additional training methods.and the kata did hold secrets, such as the correct way to do something......like a block.for example with a Tan sau, your fingers should be in line with your shoulder,and your elbow a fist away from your body.this was the msot efficient way to do it.and it was that way with all the stuff they did.maybe once or twice a month he would ask to see your kata............and you had to have all the correct stuff in it.....but the point was that the kata was very subservient to your usual training because you were doing it all the time......it maybe different with other styles but that was the WC way ( or probably better to say " with this lineage").....and I knew of an old mantis master who basically dropped all the katas.not that he didn't do the stuff in the katas.but he just felt that it was taking up too much time and being given attention that was better spent elsewhere that would be " Bamboo forest temple mantis ( a hakka style the sifu was Ho Suin ( long since dead)............but it's bad to generalise coz especially with the Chinese they change ideas and stuff all the time.and "horses for courses " people adapt and change.like kickboxing and MMA

I love this comment being here on this thread because it brings directly to mind the approach we should have when working on Kata.

And this was written from lethal force instructors as applicable to firearms as well.

I agree with Ray that there are BS Katas done by BS people who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag…who never enter a free fighting tournament…telling you that they 'don't do that'…they do 'real fighting' instead.

Sure…when was the last time they got into a real fight? Ask them to see the police report of this 'real fight' _

And I also agree with Ray about the 'secret kata' BS...held back until 'you are ready' because 'it is too dangerous' LOL…

Ray wrote

Quote:

\( I heard that Kanbun didn't either) what they did was small bits of Kata, which were tested against all types of folks and additional training methods.

Not so. Kata was very much the center piece of Uechi training along with body conditioning, culminating in 'jiuy/Kobo' [free attack /defense] in a dark dojo where a student was set upon by sempais using habitual attacks of the time at full force and speed…

…where the student needed to defend by using only the kata concepts he had been studying…this is how he trained his students.

The beauty of Uechi kata is that it is very practi8cal in what it ingrains mostly as gross motor techniques…

Wing Chun?...well I have seen some people do a Wing Chun kata that looked like a drunk stool bum falling over himself.

People need to understand that kata alone is worthless…but always combined with body conditioning, like in sanchin, and what comes next, plus working its concepts I applications showing qualities of movements…is a great way to train and to ingrain a system, if the system is worth anything.

Really,really good.ex thai boxer ( well not really ex, he would do it with you if you asked).it's individuals, really .....style means nothing at the end of the day.it's what you can do.........I have done many styles, and taken the best bits ( I hope) ...and left the dogs to fight over the bones

With my background in athleticism, as a teacher I always look at what a student brings with him to the training hall and what is physical make up is that would make him a success or a failure in a specific study of human movement.

As in the end, I believe that no matter what the style, it comes down to the study of human movements and how and why such movements become part of you_ or do not.

Better people than us in every way, have brought to us some specific aspects of dynamics and qualities of human movement in activities we choose to call styles, that performed properly and to certain depths, ingrain qualities of movement even more important than qualities of techniques.

This becomes apparent very quickly to people in the world of athletics, where in many different contact sports it is very important to ingrain movement patterns in ways that don't place you in positional jeopardy.

This is how I have always viewed kata study, especially after seeing that in free fighting tournaments_ many first place sparring winners _were also kata champions.

It goes without saying that a street fight is 'chaos' in motion…if you will…and as in certain sports where qualities of movement is the key, defensive moves require the ability to achieve positional dominance from which to strike.

Athletes quickly grasp the so called 'cut back' concept we see in many contact sports where movement is always king.

What it means is that if you are moving or have been pushed in a direction that momentum is taking you _such as frequently happens in a street fight_ and you need a directional change [ the cut back] …this important concept and quality of movement…requires the practice of the necessary footwork, such as what we see beautifully in the Uechi katas or other world class systems.

This concept of quality of movement … will make you quicker, and more agile in the chaos of a fight, as the footwork you program in Uechi kata, will not just be useful for getting off line but it will load your techniques so you can hit an assailant as hard as you can and as violently as possible to stop the fight.

To understand this quality of movement concept that Uechi kata teaches [Seisan/Sanseiryu] think of soccer where you see the angular cut of a striker's run to get around a defender, or in American football where a defensive back's cutting is performed to keep up with a receiver's change of direction.

This requires constant practice of the athletic unweighting and reorientation of the feet, all about solid body mechanics ingrained in people during decades of success inside of the dynamics of movement good kata programs and is experienced in competition against other disciplines.

This is the most underrated benefit of good kata practice i.e., setting yourself up to develop the critical ability to move or change direction in the context of an athlete angling and taking off so he can spiral back as needed, using that spiraling momentum to strike hard or take the opponent off his feet.

You also learn the ability to 'stutter step' before the cut back which allows for a directional change in situations where a two footed directional change is necessary when the footing/traction is not perfectly solid and when the sharpness of the cut is deep.

We can argue all we want about different styles, different ways et._ but in the end we need to stay with the human dynamics of motion of a particular style, long and deep, or we get nowhere.

Well I was only talking about Wing chun there......my experiences with the style.I had one teacher who had been to China and everything, did all the bowing before the master stuff..and one day he was showing me stuff that was rubbish, so I got really fed up and went looking for another teacher.......the new teacher .this is funny, had a similar experince to me and didn't go to China, he went to California to find his teacher.............right from the word go it was about fighting, nothing else and like me he had been to guys who didn't know what they were doing.his original teacher was Chinese ( he is actually a friend of a friend, though he doesn't know it)...........and when he went back to his original teacher he did the " sticking hands" drill and beat him badly.now he wasn't being nasty or anything this was just how it turned out.....but like me he had bought private lessons and hung on his teachers words and been taught nothing..now the stuff he taught me was hard to learn.it was very precise.......but this is just Wing chun, I can't really comment on karate...although I think the same thing about Tai Chi and Aikido....there are some guys who can throw a lot of knowledge at you that ,on your own, you would never think of in a million years and there are guys who may as well teach you folk dancing for what it's worth....now that won't help you in a real fight.........now as to other sports, football is a hard man's game, no question..and in my city a lot of the fighting style actually derives from that, I think a good football player could kill with a head butt.no question ( I have quite a few tales about that ).but also look at the fights professional footballers get into ........they knock cr*p out of each other....as we say " Football is a gentleman's game for thugs, Rugby is a Thug's game for gentlemen"

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